Experts have differing outlooks on Mali presidential election

As Canadian troops deploy to Mali, the country readies for a presidential election, but experts aren’t in agreement about whether its impact will be minor, major or meaningful at all to the country’s crisis.

Mali’s current president, Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, was elected in the 2013 presidential election, a year after the country deteriorated into turmoil amid the rebellion of the Tuareg population in the country’s north and a military coup deposed then-president Amadou Toumani Touré. Insurgent extremist militias have spread through the country’s north since then and remain the primary destabilizing force in the country.

Malians have the opportunity to head to the polls on July 29.

Jonathan Sears, an expert on Malian politics at the University of Winnipeg, argues in an April article in the Bulletin FrancoPaix that the presidential election will be a “highly significant” moment in Malian politics and argues that country’s chance at stabilization would be best aided by remaining under the widely-disliked Keita. He also warned that a runaway victory for the current president could erode public trust and further destabilize the country.

“On the one hand the current president being re-elected kind of looks like a vote to stay the course, don’t change horses, status quo kind of stuff, but the way it could be interpreted – and I don’t think it’s a paranoid or a catastrophizing kind of perspective – it could actually provoke a kind of reaction against the legitimacy of the re-elected president, but also a reaction against the process itself,” Sears told iPolitics.

Executive Director of Lawyers Without Borders Pascal Paradis agreed that maintaining the election’s legitimacy is crucial to the country’s stability.

“The corruption problem and the absence of justice are at the very roots of the last occurrence of violence in the country,” said Paradis. He said he’s been to Mali on behalf of Lawyers Without Borders at least 10 times since the country’s fell into crisis in 2012.

Pierre Beaudet, a professor of international development with a focus on Africa and the Middle East at the University of Ottawa, disagreed, saying he can’t imagine the election having much of an impact on the state of the country.

“So far (they) haven’t succeeded in re-establishing strong governance – I’m talking about the last two, three, four elections – so why would this one make a difference? I doubt it,” Beaudet said.

University of Ottawa professor Errol Mendes, meanwhile, argued that the president will have little legitimacy because of how much of the country that’s contested.

“The biggest challenge is that whoever is elected on the 29th is not going to be the ruler of the entire country. At best, maybe Bamako and its surrounding… At worst, maybe not even Bamako, if things get really bad,” said Mendes, who specializes in constitutional and international law and has had a wide experience in conflict zones around the world.

The country has historically had a feeble voter turnout rate. Only 46 per cent of registered voters cast a ballot in the 2013 election.

Beaudet said that because of the failures of last elections to produce any real change in the country he imagines this year’s will produce a similar turnout.

Sears predicted the same, adding that the country’s incredibly low literacy rate (33 per cent, according to UNESCO) only worsens the outlook. He explained that the country’s elections tend to be “highly personalized,” and that presidential candidates, of which there are 24, tend to have loose party-affiliations and policy-standpoints. He said votes tend to hinge on a candidate’s recognizability.

“There would have been a time in the early history of Malian democracy where left-right or political spectrum kind of talk would have made some kind of sense, but that’s when parties kind of still made sense,” Sears said.

“What has been seen in the campaign today is that candidates are quite shy in really addressing the issues and saying, ‘okay, I will make this a real priority and I will address the concern and this will be my program,’ where as it could be,” Paradis said.

“It’s also quite possible in a lot of parts of Mali who the president is, they couldn’t care less because they have no notion that will affect their lives in any tangible way,” Sears said.

Canada’s Task Force Mali plans to be functionally operational out of the United Nations’ camp in Gao in the country’s north on Aug. 1. At that point there will be 250 Canadian troops and eight helicopters in Mali. Canadian senior officials have said that 20 civilian police officers will also go to Mali to assist local police. Canada’s Armed Forces are committed to the Mali mission for a year, while there has not yet been a timeline set for the commitment of Canadian police officers.